Open sourcing a core product is easy to celebrate, but hard to initiate and sustain. This is a practical story about economic viability and how Harper open sourced our core product while protecting business health, funding continued engineering, and creating the conditions for durable community growth.
Geared towards founders, CTOs, investors, and developer relations and engineering managers, I share Harper’s intimate story of transforming our nearly decade-old, closed source code base into an actively growing open source community. I share what we learned from customer growth patterns, where adoption stalled, and how we recognized the potential of open source. From there, I dive deep into our execution strategy; separating the open source core from the commercial operations customers valued.
You’ll learn how licensing choices and clear boundaries between shapes trust, and how we approached the organizational and technical realities of moving a long-lived product into the open. If you're building or funding open source and need a sustainable model supporting profitability and momentum, this session offers a concrete path grounded in lived experiences.

Open source ecosystems are healthier when organizations sustainably contribute, not just publish code. Yet many efforts describe the end result without explaining how they got there, leaving teams uncertain about making the journey themselves.
This session shares Harper's complete open source story with concrete examples: business decisions that made it viable, technical challenges we faced during transition, and ongoing work maintaining both open source momentum and commercial success. By being transparent about both what worked and what we're navigating (monetization boundaries, licensing decisions, repository synchronization, and community development) this talk helps other teams avoid common traps like unclear commercialization plans, unsustainable technical debt, and trust gaps from ambiguous licensing.
Whether you're a founder evaluating feasibility, an engineering leader planning technical work, or developer relations building community, this talk offers adaptable practices grounded in real decisions. The outcome: more organizations confident they can open source without sacrificing their business or engineering excellence, leading to more durable projects, better-resourced maintainers, and stronger open source ecosystems.